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Soft Skills and Hard Problems

There’s a cultural bias in business and technology against any information that can’t be quantified. Frank Rose reviews “The Fuzzy and the Techie” by Scott Hartley and “Sensemaking” by Christian Madsbjerg.

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Frank Rose

May 26, 2017 4:16 p.m. ET

Nearly six decades have passed since C.P. Snow gave his lecture at Cambridge titled “The Two Cultures,” and in the intervening years the rift he decried has become a chasm. On one side, the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics); on the other, the humanities. And while English literary types in the 1950s looked down their noses at those in science, the situation in the U.S. today is entirely reversed. Should the humanities even exist? Maybe in a dusty warehouse on the edge of town, but hardly on college campuses, where they suck up resources better devoted to fields of study that might actually...